Today, The BIA held an informational seminar about the programs they have available to assist in business creation for Native Americans. The Katasse Consulting Group from Alaska is going throughout the country giving seminars to lenders and business support professionals about the different BIA programs available.
The BIA has three programs Loan Guarantee, Loan Insurance and Insurance Subsidy. The BIA program is an alternative to the SBA loan guaranty programs and they should be considered when trying to obtain a commercial loan.
By the way, the BIA does not have a website because of litigation. This is a great disservice to people who want to know more about the programs. Hopefully, the situation will be settled soon.
This is not an SBDC-sanctioned site. The content on this site does not reflect the opinion of the SBDC.
Sirolli Institute Enterprise Facilitation
On the other side of town, the Sirolli Institute gave an informational workshop to the community. The Sirolli Institute is working with the New Mexico Economic Development Department to host a pilot "Enterprise Facilitation" project in New Mexico. Gallup is a potential location. According to this week's Journal article, the communities must commit resources to the demonstration project. The community is "required to recruit a widely representative local management board of at least 50 volunteers who are passionately committed to the community, believe in the intelligence of the local population, believe in private enterprise, and are willing to share their networks and resources to assist local entrepreneurs with developing business ideas." Sirolli's requirements aside, a community must be large enough for to have enough of these type of people to commit to the effort to make a real difference.
The Sirolli process seems basically like a program of network development for communities who have trouble with networking already for whatever reasons. I won't say catch twenty-two, but didn't President Clinton have kind of the same idea with the USDA AmeriCorps program in the mid 90's?
I admit that networking is totally important for the development of entrepreneurs and their small businesses. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2002 report, in a survey of over 7,000 American households, 28 percent of low income respondents said they knew entrepreneurs. Of the respondents who identified themselves low income and as entrepreneurs themselves, 58 percent said they knew entrepreneurs. Compared to the 68 percent of both middle income and high income entrepreneurs who responded that they knew entrepreneurs.
The Sirolli program could make networking easier and better quality. A program could help the nascent entrepreneurs (people who are in the process of business planning) have access to a quality mentoring system. Back to Gallup -- a lot of the business planning we do is for micro businesses. These businesses do not generate many jobs at the outset and the operations are small. An ambitious program like Sirolli might leave these "less sexy" entrepreneurs to the wayside in search for larger enterprises.
This is not an SBDC-sanctioned site. The content on this site does not reflect the opinion of the SBDC.
posted by Silentman, Henry C. @ 20:37 hours MT(GMT-7)
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